Puerto Vallarta is seriously picturesque, nestled between palm-covered
mountains, a river and an azure sea, full of cobblestone streets and whitewashed
houses, and sitting in front of a gorgeous sandy beach.

There are dolphins in the bay year-round, and humpback whales between
November and March. Locals insist that if you stand on the seafront in
April, you can see giant manta rays leaping into the air during their
mating rituals.

The city has mutated from a sleepy seaside village into an international
resort so quickly that it is fashionable to deride its spoilt charms,
but it's almost impossible to hold a grudge against its lively beaches,
galleries, bars and restaurants.

Puerto Vallarta attracts over 2.5 million visitors every year (over half
of them from within Mexico), began its urban life as late as 1851, when
a family by the name of Sánchez plonked themselves down near the
mouth of the Río Cuale.

The area was part of the traditional lands of the indigenous people that
lived along the coast for many centuries, and was probably was never seen
by anyone else until the 16th century, when passing Spanish armadas stocked
up on local water and firewood. The Spanish were quite taken with the
sheltered harbour and several times considered establishing a colony there,
but never got round to doing it.

Groups of farmers and fisherfolk, emboldened by the Sánchez land-grab,
followed suit, and within 35 years there were enough people living in
the area to seriously entertain the idea of giving the settlement a name.
The town's first official incarnation was as Las Peñas.

1918: 'Puerto Vallarta' was cobbled together from puerto (port) and the
name of a former state governor, Ignacio Luis Vallarta.

1954: Mexico's main domestic airline began to realise the tourist potential
of what was a beautiful village in a pristine bayside location, and started
flights to a dusty runway in what's now the centre of Puerto Vallarta,
in an area originally named after the peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.
At that stage, in 1963, Puerto Vallarta had a population of only 2000
people. The real turning point in the development of the local tourist
industry came almost a decade later, when a film director John Huston
decided to shoot his adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the
Iguana in the nearby cove of Mismaloya.

All of this ensured that Puerto Vallarta became the place for Americans
to come for some tropical romance. Once the film crew had left, the tour
groups loaded with starry-eyed honeymooners started to arrive. The international
press quickly dropped their interest in the creative efforts of gifted
director Huston and a crew that included famous Mexican cinematographer
Gabriel Figueroa, and descended on Puerto Vallarta to expose the secret
romance between lead actor Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. While
they were at it, they also wrote lots of low-minded prose about co-star
Ava Gardner.

1968: it used the influx of visitors and investors generated by all the
overblown publicity to lobby successfully to become a designated Mexican
'city', and then began building highway links south along the coast to
Barra de Navidad and north to Compostela, with a new international airport
thrown in for good measure.

In the decade from 1980, the permanent population of central Puerto Vallarta
doubled to over 100,000. The resort-city gets 2.5 million visitors annually,
1.5 million of whom are Mexicans. Puerto Vallarta has since gone on to
become one of Mexico's premier international beach resorts, commanding
as much tourist-brochure space as other Pacific playgrounds like Acapulco,
Mazatlán and Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa.